Britt's Blog

I finally feel like it’s summer, having gotten over the run-over-by-a-truck feeling that follows the semester.

J and I are finally tackling our front hall, where we had some water damage that necessitated the replastering of a section of the front wall, which has been naked since, like, last summer.

We have chosen a color scheme and we may, one day soon, actually be able to paint. But with the all the stuff you have to do before you paint, I’m wondering if we ever actually will.

Today, we’re finishing up stripping off the wallpaper.

This is an activity which seems to tap strongly into certain not-always-positive personality traits of mine, namely the compulsion to work systematically through tedious, detail-oriented tasks. This can, under certain circumstances, be a good thing, of course. I think pretty much any scientist, or even every academic, has to have this tendency to some degree—otherwise you don’t end up with a PhD thesis, and you quit graduate school and do something stimulating and fulfilling with your life.

But the same tendency can also cause me to spend two hours hour grinding through a sudoku, despite the fact that I really don’t like doing sudokus. (No offense to people who like sudoku. For me they’re a noxious cocktail of un-put-down-ability and uninteresting math that doesn’t lead to the solving of a physics problem.)

See also my unhealthy relationship with my Christmas tree.

Luckily, J is around so that I don’t forget to eat. I think at this point we are going to have to set a timer, and after it goes off, declare the walls Clean Enough. Otherwise I’m going to spend the rest of the week scratching at sub-millimeter-sized gobbets of wallpaper paste. Last night J had to physically take the scraper out of my hand while I protested, “But there is still stuff on the wall.”

Wish us luck. Next: patching and priming.